You have to be joking right? Take a look back through this year and how many similar threads like these have popped up every single instance some staff (“ambassador”) members reply and offer nothing useful to the thread; none of them tell us what’s being done. Despite this you’re still willing to post “it’s in the pipeline” (Envato phrase of the year?). Take a look at my earlier posts here, I said a staff member would reply when it reached 100 replies, and bang on cue, Carmen turns up.

Tell me, how long does it take to add a few very basic things to the site?

Those items on that list are not difficult. The truth is Envato developers do nothing, and they have been doing nothing for the past year. Instead we’ve seen some silly little design changes. Heck, even when tuts+ got hacked, you STILL had flaws that were not fixed. You may recall I posted these in a thread in public which you guys removed. Also, you guys are still using the amember system, which you were supposed to be getting rid of, or so we were told.

This is proof you (Envato) has no interest in changing anything around here; if you did it would have been done. No matter how big or small a site is, it doesn’t take 3 years to implement some small changes. You just can’t be bothered. Heck, even independent developers have made userscripts to fill in for your incompetence. Envato is arrogant; it thinks it’s better then everybody else and can ignore authors and its users.

The only way things will change is if authors take their business elsewhere. I seriously hope a new competitor comes along and takes advantage of Envato’s weaknesses, because it might make them realise authors are the most important people here.

First of all, I agree with Thecodingdude. Those requested features are very easy to implement.

For me, only logical answer is Envato is working on a complete revamp of the site, and that’s why they are not developing for the current site.

crozer said
I just want to add a little comment, in hopes of helping Envato understand the underlying problem here. It must be tough going through all these comments and grasping the source issue. I’ll try to summarize it in one sentence.

You are prioritizing things (read features, visual changes, bundles, etc.) over requests that we, as authors, consider essential to the positive growth of the marketplace(s).

Instead of the 50+ design-related changes you have done in the past 3 years, you could have improved the rating system. Instead of the useless bar to my left, you could have put the reply-button on the comments-section under each reply. Instead of adding the “Upload item” feature to our dashboards (which, I am sorry, but I find completely senseless), you could have simply enabled us to see all of our followers, you could have dedicated 3 months to producing a good searching-system, shopping carts, a way for authors to communicate with buyers anonymously, and oh so much more.

Guys, it’s not about throwing rocks at you, but you keep doing struff that we (or at least I) can’t really comprehend. We have asked for features that are simply essential, necessary to the marketplaces, and we have received exactly the opposite (with some exceptions of course). I stood behind your back when the requests were 1, 3, 4, 5 months old.. but it’s been 3 years! The Envato marketplaces have always been strong because of their strong relationship with the community. If you decide that adding, for example, a “Upload item” feature to the author dashboard will enhance the author’s UX, then tell us why, talk to us.

Guys, I feel your frustrations, being an author myself. I don’t post here much but I check the forum and I try to keep up with the important topics and discussion that happen almost everyday.

It feels like apart from a few awesome ambassadors, Envato has a disconnect with the author community as a whole (or at least it looks like it). It’s like we are banging on a brick wall. Most of the responses provided are half a**ed at best.

It’s very frustrating. Most authors come here to vent these frustrations and nothing seems to be done for months, even years.

I mean, how hard can it be? Most of the features requested here are not that difficult to implement! Some may require A/B testing etc but still…

I wish you (Envato) listen more to authors because a business that doesn’t listen to their customers/authors and adjust accordingly is doomed which is sad but true.

Lots of interesting comments from everyone which make for useful reading. Keep giving us the feedback – it helps us, even when its painful to hear. I’ll try and respond to several of the points.

More generally I think a lot of my time this year has gone into scaling up our operations to cope with the increase in: buyers, authors, affiliates, items, signups, sales, deposits, downloads, visitors, pageviews, clicks and so on. By almost every metric, every month is a record month (barring say a short month after a serious bundle or something). Its pretty unbelievable actually.

That’s pretty exciting, but it also means that 1% problems are now serious issues we need to figure out. And to help with that we’ve hired a metric bucket load of new people that you’ll be hearing about in the coming weeks to help with this. Of course hiring takes a serious amount of time to make sure we get the right people on board. As it should.

Thecodingdude said
No worry! Developer justinfrench has turned up and appears to be our saviour!
Hopefully we can start communicating directly with devs and not through middle-men as devs have power to make things happen

Justin going to be taking a much more active role with our product development roadmap. Expect to hear even more from him and team in the coming weeks and months.

@Vahid – If you could shortly try to answer 2 questions, that would really be awesome. 1.) Are we getting new search system on each marketplace? 2.) Are we ever getting video rollovers at videohive? Thank you and keep up the good work!

It feels like apart from a few awesome ambassadors, Envato has a disconnect with the author community as a whole (or at least it looks like it). It’s like we are banging on a brick wall. Most of the responses provided are half a**ed at best.

It’s very frustrating. Most authors come here to vent these frustrations and nothing seems to be done for months, even years.

I mean, how hard can it be? Most of the features requested here are not that difficult to implement! Some may require A/B testing etc but still…

Any company that’s doesn’t listen to its customers deserves the problems it has. Our community team has gotten a little smaller recently so we’ve been trying to off load some of their projects so that they can focus on listening and talking to you guys more.

For example, we’ve hired Alex Holmes, a marketing guy who will be taking over future bundles – the Holiday one was the first one that he did working with Carmen. In future he will be handling them himself. More importantly he has a bunch of ideas for how we can be way more effective at Marketing. Even though he’s only recently joined us he already massively increased our performance on AdWords. You’ll be hearing from him in the next week or so.